While many liberals pined for a younger alternative during both the 2020 and 2024 primaries, Senate Democrats have long been vocal in supporting the 81-year-old’s reelection bid.
“You don’t make trades. We have our nominee. He’s the leader of the free world. He’s the leader of our party and he’s objectively good at this job,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said in a late January interview.
“I think the president is in a very strong position,” Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) said at the time.
Like more than two-thirds of the current Democratic caucus, Schatz, 51, and Ossoff, 37, never served a day with Biden during his 36 years in the Senate. They come from the Senate generation that only knows him as the 70-something vice president and now, an octogenarian president. But, like most Senate Democrats, they have been courted and tended to with great care by White House officials.
But as Biden’s hold on the Democratic nomination has weakened after his poor debate performance against former president Donald Trump, Senate Democrats have grown less boisterous about the president’s future.
As of late Saturday, not a single Democratic senator had publicly called for Biden to step aside, though many remain worried about his ability to run the sort of vigorous campaign to defeat Trump as well as if he is up to the challenge of serving another four years.
That’s in stark contrast to the House, where five Democrats have formally asked him to step aside and at least 11 others have raised concerns publicly about whether he should reconsider his plans.
But those same Senate Democrats have remained relatively quiet in a manner that could suggest a more ominous future. Chamber members return to Washington to talk in person Monday for the first time since June 20, when the Senate began midsummer legislative break.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), known for his aggressive approach to home-state politics, has barely appeared in public since the June 27 debate.
“I’m with Joe Biden,” Schumer told reporters on Tuesday in Syracuse, vouching for the president’s acumen.
He has not made any television appearances or radio interviews to offer greater support for the president. His counsel has been kept to many one-on-one conversations, including a Wednesday call with Biden.
Behind the scenes, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) has been talking with other Senate Democrats about assembling a group to ask Biden to step aside, as The Washington Post’s Leigh Ann Caldwell and Liz Goodwin first reported Friday.
Warner’s aides did not deny the effort. Asked about the report while campaigning in Wisconsin, Biden said “only” Warner had been discussing this matter.
That response suggested just it could be a politically psychological blow if a group of Democratic senators publicly calls on Biden to step aside.
When they do speak in public, Senate Democrats have tended to offer support for the president but suggest he still needs to make a stronger case to sway voters.
“The way he’s really going to convince people is being out on the trail doing what Joe Biden does best. He’s not the politician that is the best at giving a speech before a hundred thousand people,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told reporters in Virginia Beach Friday.
But Kaine, the vice-presidential nominee in 2016, left open the possibility for someone else to lead the ticket.
“If Joe Biden says, ‘I can do this,’ then I believe him, because he’s never given me a reason not to believe him,” Kaine said. “And if Joe Biden concludes he can’t, I think he is the kind of patriotic person who will take that George Washington move and say it’s time for someone else.”
Hours before the debate in Atlanta, Ossoff led an event with local leaders and small business owners promoting Biden and Vice President Harris’s campaign. “I am here to deliver a very simple message: We must reject Donald Trump’s comeback,” Ossoff said.
He said small businesses “appreciate competent leadership” that put Main Street at “the center of this administration’s attention.”
Ossoff has been relatively quiet since the debate. His office provided a statement from an unnamed aide to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution saying he “fully supports President Biden’s reelection” and blasted Trump as “the most dangerous presidential candidate” ever.
Schatz, one of the most dynamic senators on social media, has not mentioned Biden by name since the debate concluded.
“Here is my best advice re the last 48 hours. If you are gonna stare at your screen all freaked out, then use your energy to do something that will help,” Schatz wrote two days after the debate.
He then provided a link for liberal activists to volunteer with groups campaigning to elect Senate Democrats, state legislative Democrats and a leading progressive advocacy group.
There was no link to the Biden-Harris campaign site.
For a few days after the debate, their campaign embraced a talking point that no elected Democrats had called on Biden to step aside before next month’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But that line fizzled as House Democrats began calling for him to stand down.
Among Schumer’s caucus, Sen. Joe Manchin III (I-Va.) came closest last weekend, when, as The Post reported, an all-hands-on-deck crew worked to stop him from using one of the Sunday political chat shows to break with the president.
The effort to rein in Manchin, who formally changed his party registration to independent this year but who still attends caucus lunches, had echoes of the summer of 1998 when congressional Democratic leaders worked feverishly to avoid defections about whether Bill Clinton should resign as president.
Reporters tracked Joseph I. Lieberman, then a Connecticut Democratic senator who would serve as the 2000 vice-presidential nominee before leaving the party in 2006. Lieberman then was considered a conscience of the Senate and many believed would call for resignation amid revelations about the affair with an intern.
“Such behavior is not only inappropriate,” Lieberman finally said in a floor speech. “It is immoral and it is harmful.”
But he never demanded Clinton’s resignation, nor did any Senate Democrat. At the impeachment trial, every Senate Democrat voted to acquit Clinton.
Like today’s situation, House Democrats had less loyalty: 31 voted to formally begin an impeachment inquiry and five voted to impeach him.
Biden and Clinton face vastly different circumstances.
Clinton had been reelected two years earlier, by a wide margin, when voters already had plenty of information about his personal behavior. His approval ratings soared throughout 1998 amid the sex scandal and remained steady in the months after the release of a lurid special counsel report.
Biden now faces reelection at a time when a large majority of the public questions his ability to do the job, and the debate performance only further confirmed those fears.
On Sunday just two members of Schumer’s caucus — Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — are slated to appear on the political shows.
Murphy, 50, like Schatz and Ossoff, has been a strong defender of Biden but has spent most of this Senate recess in private. He remained supportive of Biden in a local media interview on June 28, but said about the debate performance: “there isn’t any sugarcoating it.”
Sanders, 82, has emerged as one of Biden’s most vociferous surrogates. During the debate week, he barnstormed Wisconsin on Biden’s behalf. As he told the Associated Press on Tuesday, the president’s debate performance might have been “painful” but the alternative is worse.
“I’m going to do everything I can to see that Biden gets reelected,” Sanders said.
If he is to survive, Biden needs more senatorial supporters like Sanders.
